


A Friendly Game

by jottingprosaist (jane_potter)



Series: The Wheel Turns [4]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Drinking Games, Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9141418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jottingprosaist
Summary: During his year of adventuring, Lleros spends the night in Shor's Stone. A drinking game of difficult questions brings some bitter truths to light.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written as commentfic for a series of meme questions on tumblr. Thanks to Chamerion, Mickimonster, LinnetMelody, and two anonymous people for the asks!

"A traveller who chooses to venture into the province's rustic hinterlands will of course find themselves staying at an inn, taphouse, or even, in the smallest settlements, on the floor of the alderman's house. Befriending a local before dark may also gain you an invitation to pass the night at someone's house, for many Nords offer hospitality easily and all take it very seriously. However, you should be aware that custom at the inns of Skyrim's rural villages is very different than at inns of cities closer to Imperial influence.

"Partaking in alcohol is, as you know by this point, expected. If you have the coin, buy at least one round for the house; if you can't afford that, buy a drink for the first patron to greet you, or buy an ale by way of introduction to the patron sitting nearest you. In order to allay suspicion about an outsider's character, locals may also expect a stranger in their midst to participate in drinking games.

"I leave it to the traveller's judgement as to whether or not to participate in games involving wrestling, fist fighting, knives, or other feats of physical prowess. I only offer the warning that most Nords have far more experience with these games than you, and advise you to err on the side of caution and not assume that alcohol will blunt any Nord's abilities.

"One taproom game especially common in the western Holds of Skyrim is simply called Honesty. Fortunately, it is not a dangerous game, nor does it necessarily involve lots of alcohol. The rules are simple: one person puts down a coin, and then must answer a question asked by the other person; then the other player puts down a coin and answers a question; and this continues for multiple rounds. The goal is to ask a question difficult, embarrassing, or intrusive enough that the other person will refuse to answer. Refusal to answer is a forfeit, at which point the asking player wins all the money. It combines the Nordic love of storytelling (or bragging) with the goal of getting to know a stranger, with the added possibility of winning money.

"A keen eye for emotional weakness and a high tolerance for friendly social humiliation are key. I, frankly, would rather play with the knives than detail my first amorous exploit to a group of laughing Nordic warriors."

\-- _A Traveller's Guide to the Imperial Provinces: Skyrim (Chapter 3, Social Customs)_

 

* * *

 

_"Adventurer like you, you must have been in some rough situations. You ever had a close call to being killed? Some time you weren't half as clever as you thought yourself?"_

Oh, you're trying to be hard, aren't you? But this is almost a _fun_  question. It wasn’t at the time, of course, but twenty years of hindsight and growth make it amusing.

I’ve risked death at many turns, though sometimes I didn’t realize it. Children rarely do. This time... oh, I knew it.

Mother and I had been paid to find a cheesemaker’s missing sister. The woman had taken her axe in search of treasure–- not an uncommon event, we were told-– but had missed the date she was due to return by a week. Our lead took us to a barrow half-sunken in the marsh on the south shore of Lake Ilinalta. We entered by the broken iron grating over the dome’s open top, the only way in, and found that the dry winter and drier summer had sucked the lake’s waterline low, low enough that the marsh had drained and the ruin’s lower passages were accessible. They were half full of mud– totally blocked when the marsh was wet, no doubt–- but passable.

Some way from the entrance, the stone passage sloped up and into a series of chambers cut from raw rock. These were dry. We were standing _inside_  some of the granite hills on the lake’s shore! Who would ever have imagined that there were rooms cut by human hands within? Some of the work of the ancient Nords is ingenious, really.

Mother warned me to be careful. These draugr had not been winnowed by centuries of intruders. As we went, though, we found that the air flues marked by carving on the rock had been recently poked clear-– there was fresh dirt and dust on the ground-– hence why there was air at all to breathe. We found a few hacked-up draugr as well, confirming that the cheesemaker’s sister had been here.

Anyway, I drag it out. We met little enough resistance that mother agreed we should split up to search. The doors we found had puzzle locks, the sort that re-set themselves after closing, and any one of them might have been the woman’s destination. So I was in one room, turning stones to retract a spiked gate, and mother was across the hall doing the same.

I thought the footstep behind me was mother. “I’ve got it,” I said, turning, and got slammed in the side of the face by–- by _force_. A wall of air. The shout of a Tongue, long since dead and buried. I was educated enough at the time to know what my enemy was, which was… well, even more terrifying than the pain. Now, I…

I have a lot of respect for the power of the Tongues, shall we say.

If I hadn’t moved, I would have been knocked straight forward into the spiked gate, face first. As it was, the focused core of the shout hit the side of my jaw and knocked it clean out of joint. I was knocked into the wall beside the gate and fell down–- I must have. That’s where I came to my senses, screaming. It felt like my face had been… ripped off, I thought.

One of the draugr that I had prodded with my sword’s tip had been slow to stir, and I had assumed it dead. Careless. It had gotten up quietly while I was messing with the stones and walked up right behind me. They’re not–- you must understand, they’re not _stupid_ , the draugr. They’re relentless, single-minded. They’re often deaf or mostly blind, yes, and some of them are simple. Maybe the years have made them forget everything but their routines. But they were men once. Some of them are sharper than the others, more cunning. More powerful. Who knows what they were in life?

The Tongue stood over me, screaming on the floor with my jaw dislocated. I saw it _laugh_. I saw its eyes burning bright blue and I saw it laugh at me.

Then mother cut its head off from behind. One stroke, clean. Its flesh and bones were as brittle as any other’s.

The Tongue’s body fell forward onto the door’s lever, and the gate opened. And wouldn’t you know it, the draugr we had stirred up on the other side came charging through.

Mother dragged me up and we ran like that door was an Oblivion Gate. Often during our raids of a barrow, we might fall back to a previous defensible point to rally against high odds, but this time we just fled. I was in so much pain I could barely stand, let alone think or stop screaming. Of course we fled!

We came back a day later, once mother had snapped my jaw back into place and fed me a lake’s worth of blue flower tea. She wanted to go alone, but I insisted. And we went _carefully_ , after that. Put a dagger through the eye of every corpse we came across, whether it responded or not.

We found the cheesemaker’s sister two halls farther into the tomb, past the spiked gate. Her blood on the floor made her easy to find. She had been cut down by the draugr just as I had, but fled deeper into the ruin rather than out. Bleeding, she had fallen to the floor and then simply stuffed herself into the lowest interment niche on the wall, hoping to hide there.  And she was alive! In a terrible state, missing a lot of blood, but alive.

She told us that she’d lain in that wall niche for almost four days, unable to leave because the draugr she’d woken were patrolling. She had eaten supplies out of her pack, and smeared salve on her stabbed side to keep out infection. And she said–- she said they had _known_  she was there, the draugr. That scarcely an hour after he had crawled in, a patrolling draugr had stopped-– had crouched down and reached in after her. She had stabbed it frantically with her dagger, and in response it had only croaked something at her, some broken words out of bone-dry vocal cords. Then it had gone to the end of the niche by her feet, where she could not stab… and pulled out the corpse of the dead draugr whose niche she shared.

“It was all wrapped up in bandages like a little swaddled baby,” she said. “One of their sleepers. Another one came and they picked it up and put it in another hole across the room, an empty one. Put an axe back on its chest.”

“They wanted me to sleep there,” she said. “They gave me leave to stay, as long as I would just stay lying down. They’d have made me one of them if I’d died there. I know it.”

I asked, later, at the College. Nobody was able to tell me for certain. We’ve a few scholars of the clever craft, one of Nordic ruins, but none who had studied the draugr instead of the stones or the people. One of my peers was fascinated by my stories, but she hadn’t produced any answers by the time I left. So who knows? Maybe the draugr _can_ make more like themselves. Maybe they’d have wrapped me up in linen and buried me alive if my mother hadn’t been there.

Dead adventurers certainly can’t tell us. But I didn’t die that day, not quite. And since I can swallow my pride enough to admit past failings, it does make for a wonderful story now.

 

* * *

 

_"So when you kill someone... what's a good kill, to you? What makes you feel right about shedding blood?"_

I... well. Well.

It has to be justified and clean. Man or beast, the same rules apply.

I don’t hunt without cause. Killing an animal when I don’t need food, fur, or coin is wasteful at best; killing a person when he’s not guilty or dangerous is murder. Mother might have raised me to be a hunter and a mercenary, but she and my father also put the fear of-– well, the fear of _themselves_ into me if I should turn myself into a criminal. I’ve known what happens to lawless men since I was a child, sir.

And I don’t kill slowly. I wouldn’t be cruel even if my parents hadn’t told me not to be. I don’t have it in me. It’s… unfortunate, in a way, that I’m most skilled with a bow: an arrow offers one of the worst deaths possible, besides a gut wound. Most arrows don’t kill, you know. Hit a limb or even a lung, and a deer can often still run a mile until the shock and blood loss set in. Men are even sturdier creatures than deer, and if they don’t pull the arrow out they can fight for a long time afterward. They might even survive a wound from a bodkin. A broadhead usually kills in the removal, though, without a healer, which is… a horrible sort of irony.

I think on the mechanics of my killing more often than you might expect. If I’m going to take lives, I should at least understand the gravity of what I do. There’s no doubt that in the past I have, at times, killed many people very quickly-– but not easily. There was thought behind the action.

The action ends with my knife, usually. Like I said: the arrow is slow. I owe it to anyone I kill, even the bandits, to bring an end to the pain quickly. I offer them time to pray, first, when I have my knife to their jugulars. Sometimes they spit it in my face, and sometimes they try to keep fighting, but… sometimes a peace comes over them. They know they have been beaten, and that I am calm and my knife is ready. They recognize that this is where their actions have led them. They take the chance to die with dignity.

Or sometimes they cry.

When I was young, I wanted killing to be easy. Now I know: it never should be. Making each death justified and clean is the most I can do to keep my conscience as light as possible.

 

* * *

 

_"Well then. What was your first kill?"_

A fish. Good, fat mountain trout, with its spotted olive-green skin. I was five. My father took me in the pony-cart down to Lake Ilinalta to buy fishmeal fertilizer for the fields. On the way back, we stopped at a good spot where the road home came close by a crook of the river. It was some tributary of mountain runoff, not granted a name on Imperial maps, and the locals called it the Kaltain or the Isain or something–- but then, it’s a rare river in Skyrim that can’t be called “cold.” I’ve seen a dozen Ice Rivers, and all of them are rightly named.

Father brought out a rod he’d bought from the Ilinalta trader. He said he’d not done much fishing since living in Cyrodiil, and Skyrim waters were much different than lowland basins, but I had to know how to feed myself off the land and surely fish were all the same in the end? Maybe they are. I finally hooked a trout and father jumped into the water to wrestle it in before it got loose. I’ve never seen him so over-enthusiastic.

When it was flopping around on the bank, I wanted to hit it with a stick. Father said no, I had to come over and take the knife. Do it clean, he said. Get my hands in the business. With a knife, it was much less complicated than my squeamishness would have made it.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you mean first _human_  kill? Were you trying to make me squirm and forfeit out of the betting with bad memories? Terribly sorry. Not this time.

That’s not _cheating_ , it’s a perfectly fair answer. You failed to–-

 _Fine_ , fine, if it makes you stop complaining. Don’t touch the coin, I’m still playing.

The first time I killed a _man_ –- a woman, actually–- I was eighteen. It was in the Forsworn Uprising. They’d lost Markarth to the Nords by then, and they had nowhere else to turn but the mountains. We didn’t expect… after two years of peace and quiet, we thought they were going to keep ruling just like the Jarl had, so we didn’t much mind any more. Well, my family didn’t, and the Reach folk didn’t, them with bits of Breton blood and elf blood and who knows what else. The Nord farmers whined like nothing else.

So suddenly there were fires burning in the valleys down the mountain, and we could see the smoke. A few survivors came running up the road in time enough to warn us what was happening–- that the farms were being seized in the name of the Reach, or slaughtered, or… it was all a mess. I still don’t know quite what the plan was. Go to a dozen different villages and you’ll get a dozen different stories about what happened when the Forsworn lost Markarth. In Sturtgard on the next mountain, they had a few wounded warriors come in for shelter for a few months, and a war leader that asked the headman to loan some ponies, and then nothing. We got murderers.

I don’t feel bad about it, you know. We had enough warning that we’d thrown up a barricade of fallen trees and set a watch. I’d been sitting in an attic in a house on the edge of town for two days, going out of my mind with fear and anxiety. But when mother finally climbed up into the attic beside me and said open the window, they were here, I suddenly wasn’t scared at all. They shot arrows at us first. I just started firing back.

So as far as I know, the first person I killed was the first one I aimed at. A woman with bones in her hair and an axe. She was right on the front of the charge, fighting through the fallen trees to get into the village. I hit her with my second arrow and down she went. No armour on her belly, how _stupid_ , I thought. Under pressure, it was just like shooting any other animal. I was surprised how easy it was. Aim and fire. It was a task to do.

Afterward, though. I had to go down to gather all my arrows up, and not everybody was dead yet. Some of my friends were dead, too. Dead goats. Houses on fire. Ah, but that’s not what you asked, is it?

My turn.

 

* * *

 

_"All this blood on your hands-- you must have spared a life here and there. What about a time you showed mercy?"_

Ugh. _Shite_ , I’m getting drunk. I need another bottle.

I have to ask, really: are you enjoying this? Is it fun for you any more? I started playing because I wanted a bit of _fun_ , not this awful… ugh.

Fine. Like I told you, I’m travelling right now. Wandering, really. Got a bow, got a sword, got places to be. Anything I like. Take paying jobs along the way, or things people need doing. Sometimes it’s people to kill, sometimes bears, sometimes draugr. Dustmen, bonemen, curse-walking shadows of long-dead warriors, guardians-in-the-graves of old. I don’t mind. I’m a Dunmer: I can light anything on fire.

But. Sometimes–- sometimes I take people with me–- I used to, anyway. They’re not always as talented as they are brave. Curse your Nord honour sometimes, anyway, if it makes you people say you’re better than you are. I need to know when my companion’s back needs watching!

He took an axe in the stomach. Old iron, ancient Nordic. Rusty, dusty, covered in gods know what. It would have festered even if it wasn’t a gut wound. Turned around from the last of my draugr to find him on the ground, trying to push the body off of him and get its axe out of his belly at the same time.

There was… there was nothing I could do. I’m not that good of a healer. Azura, seven years at the College and I _still_  couldn’t do anything. Fuck _me_. He was bleeding everywhere, crying, he’d shit himself, and I just… I had to…

–-No. _No_ , you know what? You’ve sent my mind to dark places and made me come up with an answer like this to a, to a perfectly nice question about _mercy_. You want to know about mercy?

Last month I was at Darkwater Crossing, having a nice supper with the miners. Fresh fish baked in mud around the campfire, and soup with dulse and onion and potato and some kind of water greens from the river–- something the Argonian brought in, I’m told. Had a beer, told some stories.

Then I’m walking back up the road to my camp in the dusk, and some drunken  _ass_  comes out of the dark at me and punches me in the face. Very drunk, very Nordic, all painted up-– oh, shut up, I don’t mean it like that, I mean he was painted and plaited and talked like he’d learned ten sentences of Trader’s Tongue and didn’t intend to learn the rest. There’s nothing wrong with that, only he _hit_  me.

So fine, I fought back. He came with fists, so I did the same. First to draw a blade is the guiltier before a jury. And I don’t hesitate to say I beat him roundly. Knocked him right in the dirt. Not every day I manage that, but I always try.

Suddenly he’s laughing, saying, “Hold, hold!” Telling me it was a good fight and that was all he’d wanted, his name was Hrodar Hammer-Fist and he was coming down from the Shoulder of the World, hadn’t seen any other living folk in months, and on and on.

And I could have kicked him in the face for splitting my lip and walked off, couldn’t I? Could have gone on pummeling him for jumping me. Could have kept my back right up. But he was grinning and I know his kind. Some Skyrim folk like a fight. They say you can’t know a man until you’ve fought him. So Hrodar was rude about starting it, so what. He’d have put his fists down and walked on disgusted if I hadn’t met his challenge straight on and fought right back.

So I hauled him up and he slapped my shoulder and we went weaving back to the miners to get more beer for him. He was pleased as anything when he found out I could speak a few words of the Old Tongue and tell a tale. Made myself a friend, and he travelled with me for a week or so before he picked up word of a skald living in the Velothi foothills that caught his interest. We had a few more fights before that, and he taught me some things about hitting a man in the kidneys.

Mercy. It comes with beer, sometimes, and I never mind handing it out. Better to be merciful to any man who deserves it than spite somebody just for your pride. And I’ll tell you one more thing for free: I much prefer Hrodar’s kind to the kind of Nord that would fight _beside_ me and then spit on me as soon as it was over.

 

* * *

 

_"Fine, then. What's the worst thing you've ever done?  Something cruel, unfair. You must have done something. The worst thing people know about you."_

I–- What sort of question is that? This is a drinking game, not a–- No, I’m not forfeiting. I don’t… North wind take my stupid self. I’m not forfeiting that money, I’m not sleeping in ditches all the way to Riften. Fine.

–-I _know_ what the point of the game is. I just thought we were being friendly about it.

…This was decades ago, now. In the summers when I was younger I used to travel and work with my mother. We took this bounty on a giant in… I don’t remember where, it doesn’t matter. We slept the night in a little village on our way back down the mountain.

I don’t think they’d ever seen a Dunmer there before, the way they acted. Somebody spat at mother, and when I was outside that evening some of the little children started a game of trying to hit me with rocks. Mother said we’d bite our tongues and go hungry the night rather than give anyone a penny more than we had to.

The woman of the taphouse let us pay to sleep in the attic. Only, in the middle of the night, people came storming into the taphouse yelling that-– that the filthy elf bastard had attacked a boy in the forest and tried to murder him. For no reason, they said. Beat his teeth out and smashed his face in. Mother had to call on the Ancestors’ Wrath to scare the crowd back enough for us to run.

She said that happens sometimes: that a crime happens in town when a foreigner happens to be there, and of course we get the blame. She told me not to worry myself over being blamed. She said she’d once been run out of a town because some man completely made up a story about her using some _evil_ magic to seduce him.

Of course I… I never told her… it was… It was true.

It wasn’t for no reason! And I didn’t, I didn’t want to _kill_ him, I would never… I just–-

Look. I went out for a walk that evening and-– and some of the locals came up to talk to me. Kids my age-– or what matches to my age for humans. Eighteen or so. Never seen an elf before. They were curious. Some of them were _nice_. And I thought… I’d had a few ales, I was young, I was stupid. I flirted some.

They laughed, but one of the girls, she flirted back. Maybe she was just shocking her friends. Until one of the boys said-– he called her a name, I don’t need to say what. Shamed her. He was angry at her, and me for-– for  _daring_ , I suppose. Suddenly she turned around and called me a–- and said she’d never meant it, she wouldn’t touch a filthy greyskin, she just wanted to see how much we elves would slut ourselves out at any opportunity.

I wanted to hit them all, but even then I’d learned enough to know how stupid it would be to fight ten Nords at once. I was about to cry so instead I put my chin up and went away into the forest and… sat there and sulked, really. Didn’t want to go back and sit with my mother and have her ask why I was back so early.

I didn’t plan it, all right? I was just sitting–- for almost an hour, I think–- and then there was somebody walking through the trees, and I saw. It was that boy, the one who’d said–- come to take a leak, maybe. I didn’t think. He was just wandering by me and he didn’t see me and I picked up a branch from the ground and hit him in the face. And I–- I hit him. More.

I was so _angry_ , I wasn’t–- I didn’t see what I was doing. I just wanted to hit him. Only then I saw his face, and he was bleeding, and–-

I didn’t want to hurt him like that. I wish I had never. I’ve been in plenty of _fights_ , but this wasn’t that. It wasn’t fair. Gods, I’m sick all over again.

He was awake, sort of… crying, so I knew I hadn’t killed him. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, we’re both scared here, we’ll both just go home and never tell. He won’t want to say he got beat by me, Nords never do. I thought–-

I don’t know. I left him there. I shouldn’t have. I should never have…

Divines curse you, anyway. What sort of a question is that?

Put your coin in the pile. It’s my turn now.


End file.
